Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-40.djvu/245

Rh "Oh, dear, dear!" sighed the doctor. "What a pity! Just when we are getting started so splendidly, to have to discontinue! We may never have such a chance again. However, since it frightens Denise, we must not go on. Dear, dear!"

So they left the table.

The doctor began to discuss what had happened in a very learned and scientific style. The others listened gravely enough, till all at once, "Tommy Todd!" cried Lancelot, slapping his leg, and had a more frantic attack of laughter than before. Ormizon and Denise joined him. At this, Dr. Gluck became indignant. "Well, really," she declared, with great asperity, "I must say I think you are all very frivolous and absurd."

When the young men were starting to take their leave, "Well," began Lancelot, "I hate to dissipate your fond illusions, doctor, but I feel that it is only fair for me to confess that I did it."

"Did it? Did what?" questioned the doctor.

"Why, tipped the table. I, alone and unassisted, with my own right hand, performed those prodigious feats which an ill-advised modesty induced me to attribute to Thomas Todd."

"What! Oh, you—you—!" cried the doctor, choking with anger. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself. I—I'll never forgive you—never!"

"Oh, thank you for owning up, Lancelot. I am so glad, so relieved," said Denise.

"Honestly, it was awfully mean of you," went on the doctor. "Such monkey-shines! It proves that you have no serious interest in science. Well, good-night."

Ormizon, as we know, was to sail for New York on the 26th of September. He had engaged his passage for that date aboard the steamship La Touraine, from Havre. He had done this, it seemed to him, a million years ago, in a dimly-remembered era of obscurity and chaos, when the world was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. He had done it before the flood; under the old regime; in his grub period; ere his soul had burst from its chrysalis and spread its wings. He had done it, that is to say, before he had made the acquaintance of Denise Personette.

But done, nevertheless, it was. The fact remained, like a monument of antiquity that had survived change, conquest, revolution. There in his pocket-book, tangible and legible, lay his ticket, a vestige of his former life, a legacy from his dead self; not by any means a welcome or pleasing one.

His first blind impulse was to revoke and cancel the whole business; not merely to put off his departure, but to abandon the notion of departing altogether, and abide forever where he was—in Paris, with, or at least near, Denise. But of course a very little sober reflection sufficed to make the wildness and infeasibility of this scheme patent to him. Then he turned back, and began seriously to meditate prolonging his furlough, deferring the day of his farewell. Needless